Maxwell Williams. Anosmiac!

A city under a bell jar

In the Superman stories, Kandor is the capital of the planet Krypton. It is shrunk and trapped in a glass bottle, then kept by Superman in his Fortress of Solitude. An intact city whose people still live but cannot leave. A keepsake of a lost world.

Mike Kelley, the Los Angeles artist, spent years on his Kandor series. He noticed that in the comics the city was never drawn the same way twice. Each artist, each panel, a different shape. Kelley built many versions in glowing coloured resin under bell jars, like memories that never quite match.

Anosmiac! starts there. Maxwell Williams's exhibition ran at IAO Gallery, Los Angeles, from 1 to 26 September 2022. It borrows Kelley's structure and turns it around.

A villain with a nose

Williams invents a new supervillain called Anosmiac. He is blessed, and cursed, with a supernatural nose. He was once wronged by a Superman-like hero. Now he wants to destroy a city much like Kandor, also sealed under a bell jar.

The name is already a joke. Anosmia is the word for losing the sense of smell. The one who carries that name has the strongest nose of all. As if a superpower were named after the very thing it denies.

Anosmiac's story is told through works on paper in the gallery. There is no complete comic, only fragments: a character, a grudge, a target. Visitors assemble the rest.

Candles, moulds and glowing glass

The city in Anosmiac! is made of candle wax. Several versions, as Kelley made several Kandors. But the moulds are unusual: Williams cast the wax from a range of sex toys. At a glance the towers look like futuristic architecture. Up close, they are something else.

That detail fits Williams's path. He is a perfumer, olfactory artist, researcher, DJ and producer, and a writer based in Los Angeles. He founded UFO Parfums, a gender-spectral line inspired by rave culture. His work moves through performance, sculpture and photography, and touches a personal history of sadomasochism, techno and gabber nights, global trade routes, heartbreak, and the psychology of pleasure in smelling.

Beside the candle cities stands a new perfume, SECRET LAIR. It comes in a bottle of uranium glass, glass with a small amount of uranium that glows green under ultraviolet light. A bottle that looks like evidence taken from the villain's base.

Williams also sits on the board of the Institute for Art and Olfaction, which hosted the show.

When smell is a superpower

In popular culture, superpowers are almost always about eyes and muscle. Seeing through walls, flying, lifting cars. The nose is rarely treated as a weapon. Anosmiac! puts it at the centre.

And the weapon suits the target. A candle city needs no smashing to be destroyed. It only needs to be lit. It will smell, then vanish. A villain with a nose understands this better than anyone: for wax, destruction and giving off scent are the same act.

In the same year, 2022, Williams opened CNC Musk Factory in New York, where smell was used as a form of restraint. Anosmiac! is lighter, more playful, speaking in the voice of comics. But the questions are close: who has power over a smell, and what can a nose do to the world around it.